Alberto Vilar, opera’s most generous benefactor who ended his career in jail for fraud – obituary

Alberto Vilar,who has died aged 80, became a hero in arts circles around the turn of the century as the opera world’s most generous benefactor – until 2005, when he was arrested, thrown into the New York Metropolitan Correction Centre and charged on several counts of fraud.

Vilar, a Cuban-American financier, had made his fortune in technology stocks, buying shares in companies such as Cisco Systems, Microsoft, AOL, Amazon and Yahoo from a time when they were almost unheard of. In 2002 he was valued by Forbes magazine at $950 million, and his generosity saw his name engraved into the marble of leading arts institutions around the world.

The sums involved were staggering. His donations and pledges included $45 million to the New York Metropolitan Opera (where the grand tier was named in his honour), $50 million to the Kennedy Arts Center in Washington and $14 million to the Los Angeles Opera. In Milan a grateful La Scala awarded him the title of “First Benefactor”. Even the stuffier citadels of Teutonic culture – Bayreuth, Vienna, Salzburg – accepted Vilar largesse.

In Britain beneficiaries included Glyndebourne, John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach cantata project and, most notably, Covent Garden, where his pledge of £10 million was said to have saved the Royal Opera House at a time when its development appeal was short of its target and the Blair government was demanding a clean sheet. In 1999 the grateful beneficiaries named their shiny new glass atrium the Vilar Floral Hall.

Opera-lovers around the world also had cause to thank Vilar for the support he gave to the Kirov Opera under its conductor and director Valery Gergiev. He gave huge amounts to the Kirov, including $2.5 million for Prokofiev’s War and Peace but on condition that the work be seen internationally. He also gave Gergiev a White Nights Festival budget.

In addition Vilar was the man who installed seat-back surtitles in major opera houses and introduced young singers’ programmes all over the place, including at Covent Garden.

Estimates of Vilar’s largesse to his favourite art form varied between $200 million and $350 million. In 2001 he told The Daily Telegraph that he could give away $50 million a year without feeling the pinch. “Without Alberto,” wrote Norman Lebrecht in the Evening Standard in 2005, “there would be no Covent Garden, no Kirov, no future.”

His rewards included his own front seats at the Met (A101-2) and Covent Garden (A8-9), full recognition in opera programmes and the respect he considered his due (he could be touchy if he felt it was lacking).

There was no doubting his passion for opera. He claimed to attend at least 100 performances a year and to have collected every CD set of every opera, keeping complete collections in each of his five homes around the world – in New York, California, Colorado, Puerto Rico and London. His favourites were mostly in the Italian repertoire, and at one point he even sought a private tutor to give him lessons in the language, but could not find anyone expert in the 19th-century Italian used in his favourite librettos.

Vilar always made it clear that he would finance only specific projects: “The house will come to me and this is what we want to do. And I will say yes or no. They have to disclose to me the conductor, the director, the soprano, everything, and I will say yes or no. Once I say yes, they have total artistic control.”

Some in the opera world accused him of micro-management, favouring the traditional and safe over the experimental and radical – his favourite operas included Fidelio, Turandot and Don Carlo, while his favourite director was Franco Zeffirelli – but most saw him as a saviour. “I say to the people who criticise him: don’t try to be too protective of opera – all that money could go elsewhere,” said Valery Gergiev.

And so things might have continued more or less happily were it not for the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

Vilar’s pledges were usually paid out in instalments, and in early 2002 reports began trickling in that payments were falling behind. As promised cheques failed to materialise, opera houses began cancelling productions and quietly removing Vilar’s name from programmes. Los Angeles Opera cancelled the Kirov’s War and Peace; Washington Opera took Vilar’s name off its Young Artists programme; his name was removed from its place of honour on the grand tier at the Met – where, the management explained, it had been placed “in anticipation of funding commitments which have not been met”.

Envious critics wallowed in schadenfreude, accusing Vilar of vanity and reporting one failed payment after another. Those inclined to give Vilar the benefit of the doubt included Tony Hall at Covent Garden, who insisted that his name should remain on the Floral Hall, only removing it in 2005 after Vilar was charged in the US with stealing money from a client, by which time the opera house had reportedly received only £4.4 million of his promised £10 million.

Vilar had been arrested in May that year and charged with defrauding an unnamed investor of $5 million in order to make good on some of his pledges, and to pay personal and business expenses for his investment firm Amerindo.

Given that his personal wealth had recently been estimated at $950 million and Amerindo’s auditors had reported $1.2 billion in assets in July 2001, it seemed unlikely that he had found himself short of $5 million, and he denied all charges.

However, when the judge set bail at $10 million, Vilar’s lawyer revealed that he had less than $10,000 in the bank. The next morning Amerindo staff were sent home as computers were removed from the company’s offices by investigators.

The response did not show the arts world in a good light as most of Vilar’s fair-weather friends turned their back on him and refused to stump up towards his bail. Eventually the bond was secured by property and works of art from Vilar’s collection – and $500,000 from Valery Gergiev.

In 2010 Vilar and his business partner Gary Tanaka were found guilty of a scheme to steal $20 million from clients. Vilar was convicted on 12 counts, including money laundering, wire fraud and lying to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Most profiles of Vilar in the British press claimed that Vilar was born in Cuba, where his father was a sugar magnate, but spent much of his childhood in Puerto Rico, where the family also owned large plantations. After the Cuban revolution, the story went, the Vilars moved to the US.

In fact he was born on October 4 1940 in East Orange, New Jersey, the son of Albert and Margaret Vilar; he was christened Albert William – the “o” was added later. There was much truth in his story, however. His father was a sugar magnate who took his family on business to Cuba and lost out when his interests there were nationalised. By the age of nine his parents were divorced and young Albert was living with his father and grandparents in Puerto Rico.

He read Economics at Washington & Jefferson College, Washington, Pennsylvania, and took a Master’s degree at Iona College in New Rochelle, New York. He then went to work for Citibank and found his way to Wall Street, where a presentation about semiconductors in the mid-1970s convinced him that the future lay in technology stocks: “I said to myself, ‘This is going to be really extraordinary. I want to be the first guy on the block.’ The big investment houses weren’t interested, so I went off on my own and I got lucky.”

In 1979, along with Gary Tanaka, he founded Amerindo Investment Advisors, a firm based in San Francisco and New York, with offices in London.

Their high-risk strategy brought some astonishing rewards, particularly in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, when Vilar declared the internet to be “bigger than the Industrial Revolution”. In 1998, the Amerindo Technology Fund gained 85 per cent and the following year it posted a 249 per cent gain. Tanaka was the company’s chief trader while Vilar brought in the investors, which included the World Bank and the New York City Employees’ Retirement System.

Vilar had fallen in love with opera when he went to the Met in the 1960s to see Lucia di Lammermoor, with Joan Sutherland in the title role. But by his own account his commitment to philanthropy had begun in childhood. “I was brought up Christian,” he told the Sunday Times in 2000, “and you are supposed to put 10 per cent of your income into the collection bucket. Since I was a little kid I got enormous satisfaction from giving money away for causes. I had a philanthropic gene, and it has grown with my wealth.”

Vilar did not confine his generosity to art. He gave $12 million to a New York hospital where he had been treated after fracturing his arm in a skiing accident, and $20 million to Columbia University to attract foreign students.

As technology stocks crashed, the value of Amerindo’s technology fund nosedived. Vilar struggled on for a time, continuing to donate and pledge cash to his favourite causes, but then his world began to fall apart.

In February 2010 he was jailed for nine years. He was eventually freed in 2018, having had a year added to his sentence for preventing victims’ families from recovering their money.

Vilar was twice married, both marriages ending in divorce. In 2001 he became engaged to Karen Painter, a musicologist 24 years his junior. Invitations went out for their wedding in October 2002, only to be “suspended” at a week’s notice. He had no children.

After his release, Vilar maintained that he had been punished for a crime in which no one lost anything – because investors were eventually repaid, with interest. “Look at the bull markets I missed; look at the operas I missed,” he lamented. Last year he was reported to be living on the dole and sleeping on a couch in a shared apartment.

And indeed his story did have elements of operatic tragedy.

Alberto Vilar, born October 4 1940, died September 4 2021